From 13 entries to 739: the week the pipeline came online

Week 11 was the inflection point. The project went from a hand-curated seed catalog to a full agent-driven pipeline producing hundreds of entries per day. The schema was overhauled, the monorepo consolidated, observability stood up, and six import projects ran concurrently. By Sunday the catalog had 739 entries, 145 frames, and 21 categories.

By the Numbers

• 474 entries added in seven days, up from 13 at week start. Cost: $241.75 total, roughly $0.51 per entry.
• 460 agent runs across the week. The miner (opus) dominated at $179.87 (74% of spend). The smelter (haiku) handled 118 runs for just $3.95 — the cheapest agent per run by far.
• 50 PRs merged, 50 issues closed. The auto-merge workflow went live mid-week, cutting manual merge overhead to near zero.
• Peak day: 193 entries on March 13, the day the pipeline hit full stride with multiple import projects running in parallel.

What Shipped

Content — six import projects running concurrently:

• Lakoff-Johnson MWLB canon (cognitive linguistics core)
• Jungian archetypes (PR #901 prospected, entries #945-#955 mined — shadow, self, persona, anima/animus, great mother, wise old man, senex, shapeshifter)
• Dead metaphors worth resurrecting (PR #900 — bankrupt, muscle, shell, kernel, daemon, spam, patch, silo)
• Fantasy-mythology-folklore (ouroboros, excalibur, damocles-sword, gordian-knot, pyrrhic-victory, pandemonium, cerberus, and more)
• Patterns of Software / Cathedral & Bazaar (software-habitability, piecemeal-growth, the-quality-without-a-name)
• Hacker Laws (PR #1235 prospected)

Schema v2 (PR #1458):

• Five-kind taxonomy: metaphor, pattern, archetype, paradigm, mental-model
• New fields: applies_to, grounding (proven/established/folk/contested), provenance
• Reclassified 41 paradigms to mental-model, 2 to metaphor (PR #1459)
• Added catalog/works/ for source text provenance tracking (PR #1362)

Infrastructure:

• Monorepo consolidation (PR #531) — agents repo merged into main, metaphorex.org launched
• Observability and kaizen system (PR #1193) — ops reports, digest.py, kaizen issue template
• Auto-merge on approved label (.github/workflows)
• Split licensing: CC BY-SA 4.0 for content, MIT for code
• Marginalia-inspired site theme

Pipeline & Kaizen

The full agent squad came online this week. Six agents were created or substantially rewritten:

• Miner — extracts entries from playbooks. 197 runs, the workhorse.
• Assayer — reviews and refines miner output. 123 runs on sonnet.
• Smelter — mechanical cleanup (frontmatter normalization, formatting). 118 runs on haiku, the most cost-efficient agent.
• Prospector — researches new sources, builds playbooks and manifests. 9 runs on opus.
• Surveyor — validates prospector output before mining begins. 7 runs.
• Fixer — applies kaizen fixes to agent prompts and scripts. 1 run (kaizen backlog was empty most of the week).

The /work orchestrator command was built to dispatch agents in sequence: smelt → assay → mine → prospect, with a kaizen triage phase.

Session and identity management took shape. The project moved from a single workspace (-workspace-metaphorex) to a second workspace (-workspace-m4x-factory) mid-week, establishing the pattern of separate working directories for different operational contexts. GitHub auth and bot identity setup appeared in multiple sessions as the crew configuration system was bootstrapped — laying groundwork for agents to operate under their own GitHub identities via the /configure command and agent-identity skill.

Bug fixes:

• survey.py: fixed detection of needs-survey label and REST sub_issues API (PR #943, issue #1369)
• Auto-merge workflow: added missing --repo flag (PR #1365)

18 new scripts landed, including digest.py (ops/changelog generation), validate.py improvements, survey.py (work queue), stats.py (cost accounting from issue comments), and several backfill utilities for the schema migration.

Steering Notes

Key decisions from session logs (March 9 steering session):

• Em-dash ban as style norm. “Presence of em-dash is considered proof of AI-slop-ness.” Established as editorial guidance — agents must use periods, colons, or shorter sentences instead.
• Authorship attribution policy. Seed content re-attributed to fshot rather than source authors, after weighing competing arguments about credit vs. provenance.
• Security category created as standalone (not merged with risk). “Just create security, not risk, for now.”
• Frame roles simplified. Initial design was too complex for systematic enumeration. Backtracked to simpler guidance after discussion: “that’s too complex, please backtrack.”
• Gold-standard entries identified. the-commons.md and firewall.md selected as style exemplars after explicit evaluation of the seed catalog.
• Eval hypothesis planted. Late-week session explored whether LLMs with catalog access outperform those without — designed as a milestone series to test as the catalog grows. Led to embeddings pipeline and eval framework design docs.
• Dotfile management with chezmoi discussed as a way to track user/system-level improvements across sessions.

What’s Next

• Hacker Laws import project queued (prospected, not yet mined)
• Content enrichment pass at 47% (transfers + limits for existing entries)
• Eval framework design docs written — implementation pending catalog growth
• Kaizen backlog empty — pipeline running clean, friction not yet accumulating at scale